


between the lines of fear and blame, you begin to wonder why you came

by readergirl1013



Series: just kiss off into the air [5]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Depression, Fame, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Interviews, Loss, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, News Media, Past Character Death, Past Child Abuse, Press and Tabloids, References to Depression, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 23:50:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20072659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readergirl1013/pseuds/readergirl1013
Summary: Her story needed to be told. Vanya had been hidden away for too long, kept in the dark as though she were some horrible family secret thanks to their father at first and later by them as her loss was too raw.Too late Allison realized that this wasn’t the way to go about it.





	between the lines of fear and blame, you begin to wonder why you came

between the lines of fear and blame, you begin to wonder why you came

“Allison!” “Allison, over here!” “Allison, who are you wearing?”

Allison ignored them all and continued walking her ‘date’ down the red carpet for the Primetime Emmys. She was nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for her four-episode guest appearance on _ Orange is the New Black _ that culminated in her character - which everyone had thought was going to become a series regular - committing suicide.

“Allison, who is that you’re with?”

Bingo. 

Allison and her ‘date’ stopped. Allison smiled at the reporter a little more genuinely than she usually did. She thought the woman was with E! 

“This is Agathe Beaumont,” Allison introduced the petite redhead with her, “she works with the International Association for Suicide Prevention.”

The next question, of course, was about why she’d brought some random woman from a suicide prevention organization. 

Allison managed not to roll her eyes, aware that the obvious questions were needed for the viewers back home to follow the conversation if they didn’t watch whatever show the actor being interviewed was in. Out loud she said, “I thought that bringing her would generate some much-needed discussion about suicide prevention amongst Hollywood and our viewers alike, especially considering my character and why I got the nomination tonight. It’s even more important to discuss suicide prevention today, since September 10th is World Suicide Prevention Day.” She drew Agathe forward. “Here, I’ll let Ms. Beaumont tell you a little more about herself and her work.”

She kept her smile up as Agathe spoke with the reporter about preventing suicide. She was hesitant and nervous at first, but as the reporter seemed genuinely interested she warmed up to the topic. Soon other reporters began to gather around to film the oddity that was Allison Hargreeves’ date to the 2015 Emmys as she rambled about the importance of working to prevent suicide.

Every now and then a question was directed at Allison and she gamely answered them before tossing the ball back into Agathe’s court. She’d brought the other woman for a reason.

Finally, one of the reporters thought to ask, “Allison! Is your character’s fate the reason you brought Ms. Beaumont as your date?”

“Partly,” Allison answered. “What happened with my character, Callie Lamonte, is far too common and is preventable. Had there been proper mental health services available to her or simply someone who knew what to say to her, her death might have been prevented.” 

She took a deep breath. “I also brought Agathe because I have personal experience with losing a loved one to suicide and if I can prevent someone, even one person, from committing suicide and keep their family from the devastation of losing them then I’ll do whatever I can to do that. Awareness is just the first step.”

There was a hush of stunned silence for a moment. The reporters were obviously trying to figure out who she had lost. Allison had been in the news since she was thirteen years old and not once had she mentioned losing someone to suicide. Neither she nor her brothers had ever said anything regarding losing Vanya to suicide before they’d decided to vanish from public life. They’d all agreed though when Allison had told them that she wanted to share Vanya’s story at long last and explained how and why she wanted to go about it.

Their sister had been hidden away for too long.

“Who did you lose?”

“My sister, Vanya,” Allison answered, fighting to keep her voice even. “She was born the same day as the rest of us and raised alongside us all. We love her dearly and still miss her terribly. She committed suicide when we were thirteen.”

Agathe put one hand on her arm. Allison gave her a genuine smile. She’d talked to the other woman about this beforehand, about her uncertainties and fears, and Agathe had listened carefully as they’d hashed out a plan. She was grateful for her support now.

“Why did she kill herself? And why haven’t we ever heard of her?” a reporter demanded. “We’ve heard of the rest of you.”

Allison leveled him with a flat look. TMZ. Typical. 

“My father was not a good man.” Because it was time for that to be known, too. “He decided that Vanya had no powers and was therefore not truly part of the family,” she kept her voice and features blank in a way that would speak volumes to those willing to listen. “He tore her self-esteem and self-worth to shreds and isolated her from everything and everyone - including us. He kept her from the public view, even claiming he only had six children, just to isolate her even further. Eventually, I believe that the constant emotional abuse and became too much for her and she felt death was her only escape. I wish desperately every day that she’d felt there was another option because I still miss Vanya horribly. Her loss was truly devastating to my siblings and me.”

“In cases of abuse where the victims feel trapped and hopeless and like they’re a burden on others, suicide sometimes seems to be an acceptable - even appealing - option,” Agathe jumped in.

Allison smiled at her. Then looked at the reporters. “Sorry, we need to get going.”

She hooked her elbow through Agathe’s and moved further down the red carpet. They stopped occasionally and Allison grit her teeth and kept talking about Vanya. 

But the more she did, the more Vanya’s memory felt... cheapened. 

Yes, her story needed to be told. Vanya had been hidden away for too long, kept in the dark as though she were some horrible family secret thanks to their father at first and later by them as her loss was too raw. 

Too late she realized that this wasn’t the way to go about it.

Allison was relieved to get inside the building and out of sight of the reporters. For the first time, she was grateful she didn’t win the award so she didn’t have to give her carefully prepared speech about suicide prevention and the importance of getting help both as someone contemplating suicide and as the survivor left behind. (She still apologized to Agathe though. The woman waved her off and eyed her with concern that she Allison ignored.)

She locked herself at home after everything was over and ignored the tabloid speculations and the slightly better entertainment news medias’ research into Vanya over the next week. She ignored it when Patrick called her to ask if she was okay. (He was sweet but so overbearing, what had she seen in him? She was so glad she’d come to her senses and broken up with him because they were better as friends.) And she ignored it when Monica, Jennifer, Ashley, and Hannah called to ask if she was okay. She even ignored it when her agent, Tom, called to see if she was okay and, also, did she want to try out for a new pilot about the rap music industry in Atlanta?

She wasn’t okay, but that was fine, she’d get there. 

(And no, she didn’t want that pilot because she’d prefer to focus on films, as she’d told him, thanks. She left Tom that message at four in the morning when she knew he was asleep.)

Eventually, though, about a week after the Emmys, she received a call that she didn’t ignore. When Ellen DeGeneres herself called to ask if you wanted to come on her show to discuss mental health issues and suicide prevention from a survivor who’d lost someone to suicide, you agreed. Because you knew it would be done tastefully, unlike on so many other talk shows.

(She’d have agreed to Oprah, too, but Oprah wasn’t on the air anymore. More’s the pity.)

Allison had always thought Vanya would like Ellen DeGeneres’ show.

That thought wasn’t so comforting when she was waiting in the wings to come out onto the stage. She’d spoken with Ellen beforehand about what she felt comfortable discussing, circumventing Tom for once, and instead consulting her siblings for what they felt okay with her revealing, but now that she was there she was second-guessing herself. Was she really comfortable discussing all of it? Was this the right venue to share Vanya’s story, unlike the Emmys, or would this fail too?

She looked down at the photo in her hand. It was one of the few of Vanya that even existed and one of the two they had of her looking happy. She was ten in it and smiling shyly as she played her violin for an impromptu concert Klaus (although he’d still been Number Four then) had demanded after his individual training with Dad. That hadn’t been unusual. What was unusual was that the rest of them had drifted in as Vanya had shown off the new songs she’d learned and they were sitting at her feet, all six of them staring up at her with enraptured smiles as they listened to her play. Mom had taken that photo.

Their Dad had never bothered to take photographs of Vanya. Hell, he’d never even included her in the family portraits. They had nine photographs of Vanya in total from the thirteen years she’d lived. Mom, Pogo, one of them, and the waitress at Griddy’s had taken the only photos of Vanya that existed. 

In dark moments, Allison sometimes thought that if she hadn’t had those photos she’d wonder if she’d ever even had a sister. If Vanya had been real or simply someone she’d made up to escape the chaos of five brothers and an asshole of an abusive father.

Mom had let Diego smuggle the photos out when he’d left home and he’d had copies of all nine made for each of them. Allison had made more copies as soon as she had enough money to do so and had four sets of Vanya’s photos stored in different safety deposit boxes around Los Angeles, the fifth set in a fireproof box at home along with a few items to remember her by, and the final set (the ones Diego had given her) in frames around her house. She’d taken those and made another set of copies to bring in for the show.

She knew it was ridiculous having so many copies of the photos made and stored away, but it always felt like if she hadn’t done so then Dad would take them from her, like he had their rewards for doing well in training or school, and then hide the pictures away and pretend Vanya didn’t exist. Just like he always had.

“Two minutes,” a nearby stagehand told her.

Allison nodded. 

She walked out onto the stage to thunderous applause two minutes later and sat down across from the older woman. They chatted about banal things for a minute before Ellen got down to why they were here.

“So a week and a half ago at the Emmys, you made quite the splash,” Ellen said. “Your date was certainly a bit unconventional.”

Allison smiled falsely. “Was it that it was a woman? Ellen, really, it’s 2015.”

Ellen laughed. “No, no, I heartily approve of that.” Allison shot her a sly wink. “But, no, I was talking about her profession.”

There it was: her cue.

Allison smiled politely and nodded, discussing the importance of actually talking about suicide, about how talking could save lives. How to be supportive and non-judgmental if someone came to you about feeling as though they wanted to die. How to ask questions (to just plain ask questions, damn it, not like her) if you suspected a loved one was suicidal. What to say and what not to say during those discussions. About the hotlines and how if someone was feeling as though they wanted to kill themselves they should call for help. About Agathe and her organization and World Suicide Prevention Day.

She spoke about all the things she never had a chance to say to her only sister because she’d never asked and Vanya had never come to her.

“This is a deeply personal concern for you, isn’t it?” Ellen asked gently.

Allison nodded and began her story. “My sister Vanya committed suicide when we were thirteen.”

She talked and talked and talked. She shared memories of Vanya, of the few good times they’d had as kids because of how horribly she’d been abused (of how they’d all been abused). 

She ripped away the publics’ blinders about the ‘super-kids’ and pointed out that the entire country had let her father buy up a bunch of kids from around the world (most of them from poor families in poor countries) and turn them into child soldiers. Child soldiers that the public had applauded for being sent out at thirteen and fourteen to fight against adult criminals trying to kill them that they’d had to kill to survive. That most of them had PTSD from their childhood, that they were all broken adults because of what their father called ‘training’ and they called ‘torture’ and the fighting they’d been forced into far too young.

But mostly, she spoke about how much she missed her sister. She showed the nine photos they had of Vanya, explained that they were the only ones that existed because of how profound Vanya’s abuse had been. She spoke about how, in the end, Vanya had taken her life as a child - a little girl - because she couldn’t see a future for herself. She spoke of how her last message to them had been an apology and a goodbye because all that she had ever learned was to feel bad about and to apologize for simply existing.

She spoke of the sweet, gentle, kind girl who cried when their father found and killed the baby bird she was trying to nurse back to health when they were seven and the kittens in the alley she’d fed when she was nine. She spoke of her small, soft, gentle hands helping Mom stitch them back up after they were hurt on missions. Those same small, soft, gentle hands being forced to choke down pills their father gave her that were supposedly for anxiety but actually did who knows what. After all, what four-year-old had to take heavy-duty anxiety medications? 

She talked about her sister’s simple joy when her siblings included her. And the regret Allison would always live with because they didn’t do so often enough.

For a long minute of silence, Allison stared at the enlarged photo of a thirteen-year-old Vanya staring mournfully out at the world. It was the last photo of her ever taken. She looked so very young, with her thick bangs and mock school uniform. Her eyes were big and though young, they weren’t innocent. None of them had had innocent eyes by the age of thirteen. 

Vanya’s eyes were broken. 

“This is the last photo we have of Vanya, not that there are many of them in the first place,” she said softly. The audience was completely silent except for the occasional sob. “She killed herself a month after this was taken. Vanya never got any older than in this photo. I was never sure whether to be grateful or not that Klaus snapped it that day he was messing around with Dad’s camera. Because it shows so clearly just how depressed my sister was... and we never did or said anything about it.”

She paused again and looked down at her hands. “The thing is, I have to live with that. With knowing that not only was my sister so depressed she took her own life but that I was a part of the reason for that depression.”

The audience shifted and Ellen, across from her, frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Vanya was psychologically and emotionally abused to a horrifying degree, but it wasn’t just my Dad who did so,” Allison said quietly, still looking at Vanya’s picture. 

Admitting this was harder than anything else, but she had come onto the show to tell Vanya’s story and that included her own negative aspects, too. She took a deep breath. “Our father isolated and degraded Vanya on a daily basis. But so did the rest of us. All of us ignored Vanya. All of us excluded her. All of us forgot her.” She smiled bitterly. “Do you know how often we all snuck out to Griddy’s Diner? We went every couple of months since the age of nine. We remembered to bring Vanya with us _ twice _. Both of those times it was because she found us about to sneak out.” 

She felt tears prick at the corner of her eyes as she added, “We also used to have these ridiculous ‘family meetings’ with all of us kids. A way to cope with the trauma, I guess. The first time, Klaus brought Vanya along. He and Five were the only ones that ever tried to include her. But Luther yelled at him for it, he claimed she didn’t belong since she wasn’t one of us. I told her to leave, she wasn’t a real part of the family since she wasn’t part of the Academy so she shouldn’t be in our meetings.” 

She grimaced and then owned up to her actual actions. “No, the truth is, I _ rumored _her to leave because for once she dared to stand up for herself. Vanya was arguing with me about being a part of the family and that it was a family meeting and not an Academy meeting so she should be there. Klaus and Five were backing her up and I… I found it unacceptable that they’d dare to argue with me. I was a selfish, cruel child. And I have far more stories like that than I do of quality time with my only sister, despite her room being only a few feet down the hall.”

“You were a child,” Ellen said quietly. “You were taught to treat her that way.”

“Yes, I was,” Allison acknowledged the truth in that statement, before looking away from Vanya’s photo at Ellen. “But if I ever want to be able to accept the fact my only sister committed suicide, I also have to accept my role in it. I can never make it up to Vanya, what I did as a child... I might have been taught to treat her that way, but I still knew it was wrong. I was a self-absorbed, terrible child and I took out my insecurities on my sister, far beyond simply ignoring her and ostracising her. I can’t take that back. I can’t even tell her I’m sorry. I can’t try and have a better relationship with her now, as an adult.”

She looked back up at her sister and tried not to cry. “I can only try to accept that I was a part of the problem that led to my sister killing herself before she ever had a chance to really live. I can only try to be a better person and hope she knows it’s in her memory. I can only try and be a part of the solution to help other kids who haven’t had a chance to live yet know there’s an alternative to killing themselves.”

Allison felt the tears drip down her cheeks, regardless of her intent not to cry. “I have to accept I can never be a part of my sister’s solution. I was only ever a part of her problems.”

Ellen reached out a comforting hand to hold hers, and Allison gripped it tightly. Probably too tightly.

But it was the feeling of a familiar, small, soft, gentle ghost of a hand on her cheek - only there because of her desire to have her sister with her seemed to outweigh even her sanity - that led to her completely breaking down on live television.

**Author's Note:**

> I'll post the next story when it's ready. Sorry for the delay, I just moved apartments (again).


End file.
